Rejected From 'Dead Poets Society,' Matt Damon Later Won an Oscar With Robin Williams

At 18, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck auditioned for roles in Dead Poets Society—and didn’t get them. That summer, the two friends wound up working at a Cambridge, Massachusetts movie theater that was showing the film, cleaning the aisles after packed screenings of the Robin Williams drama, Damon recalled on the Happy Sad Confused podcast with Josh Horowitz.

Damon said the snub stung at the time, but the irony kicked in years later: the pair wrote Good Will Hunting and ended up collaborating with Williams anyway. The story that slipped away became the spark for the one that changed their lives.

From class paper to Oscar

Here’s how they got from a college assignment to a Best Picture contender:

• Damon started the project as a roughly 40-page one-act play for a Harvard class, then handed it to Affleck to help turn into a feature script.
• An early draft included an FBI-recruitment subplot for Will; during development, producers pushed the friends to drop it and keep the focus on the character drama.
• Studios wanted bigger names in the leads, but Damon and Affleck refused to sell unless they could star. They even slipped a bogus scene into the script—two male leads kissing—to see who actually read it.
• They sold the screenplay for about $600,000, split the check, and watched most of it evaporate to taxes, reps and a few youthful splurges (including a $5,000-a-month rental and new Jeeps).
• Robin Williams signed on as therapist Sean Maguire, a move that helped lock the film and later earned him the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

The $10 million film earned more than $225 million worldwide and landed nine Oscar nominations, including a win for Best Original Screenplay.

Damon revisited the whole arc while talking career near-misses—including his long-ago decision to pass on “Avatar”—with Horowitz on Happy Sad Confused.